From Microsoft offerings for C++ devs, just keep using MFC, or in your case wxWidgets.

They will mention WinUI, but the team pushing for C++/WinRT killed all VS tooling support that C++/CX, so for doing WinUI with C++ you are stuck editing IDL files without any kind of VS tooling support, and also have to copy/merge the generated C++ files of the IDL ones.

I basically agree with pjmlp: Win32/MFC has always worked and will continue to work.

> in C# land WinForms was discouraged

Portability, it seems. Not unreasonably, they're focusing on C# as a backend language in UNIX-like environments. While you can run WinForms from dotnet core, doing so adds a large chunk of libraries to your deployment and of course only works on Windows targets. I'm not sure I entirely approve of this direction, but it follows from targeting Java, and I do prefer C# to Java.

Of course, if you just want a little bit of the API, there's nothing stopping you from just p/invoking it out of user32.dll, which I did last month ...

> While you can run WinForms from dotnet core, doing so adds a large chunk of libraries to your deployment

Sounds like the direction Java took, moving JavaFX (a rather underrated GUI toolkit from what I can tell) out of the core Java standard library.